My Father, The President

Editor’s note: In some editions of his memoir “My Father at 100,” author Ron Reagan says that the President underwent surgery in San Diego in 1989 following his fall from a horse. As it turns out, the President did not undergo surgery in San Diego at that time, and subsequent printings of the book will correct this point.

One hundred years after my father’s birth, what accounts for his uncanny magic? He’s been gone from public life for nearly 20 years, dead for over half a decade, yet he’s remained alive in the minds of many Americans.

Most people, whatever their political beliefs, relate to my father as president of the United States. For eight years, he was my president, too. But he was my father for my entire life.

My memories start with him lifting me and “flying” me through the rooms of our house, mimicking the drone of a propeller engine, before swooping me into bed for the night. Using one of his early nicknames for me, he would sing in his soft, unself-conscious tenor:

Old Skipper Reagan was a merry old soul And he went to Heaven on a telegraph pole. But the pole was thin and Skipper fell in, Right in heaven up to his chin.

Like all my siblings, I loved my father deeply, at times longingly. He was easy to love but hard to know. You couldn’t help wondering sometimes whether he remembered you once you were out of his sight.

And he was so naturally sunny, so devoid of cynicism or pettiness. Something in his guileless wonder at the world made you want to shield him from harsh reality. His dreams might strike you as naive, but the way he cherished them made you reluctant to shatter his illusions. Who wouldn’t, after all, want to live in a shining city?

We all grow up idolizing, dethroning, and, with luck, later befriending our fathers, but can we really know them? Do they care to know us? At his own father’s funeral, Dad was overcome by a wave of despair until, he said, he heard Jack’s voice telling him, “I’m okay.” I have not, as of yet, heard my father’s voice whispering in my ear, but I haven’t stopped listening.

On March 30, 1981, my father was shot by John Hinckley Jr. as he was leaving the Hilton in Washington, D.C. My wife and I were in Lincoln, Neb., but we hurried back to D.C. and headed straight for the hospital. Dad was in surgery, and I gathered immediately that the situation was dire. My mother, unsurprisingly, looked pale and shaken. She seemed even tinier than usual in a room full of bustling, officious bodies, none of them telling her what she wanted to hear: Her husband was still alive, he would make it. Her prime directive for 30 years had been to support, nurture, and protect my father. Now, with his life hanging by a thread, she was locked out of the room, helpless.

Much has been made of my father’s joking that day: “Honey, I forgot to duck”; “All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia”; and, to his surgeons, “Please tell me you’re all Republicans.” Del Wilber, a journalist working on a book about the assassination attempt, told me that Dad first tried out that last line in the emergency room, where the personnel were understandably in no mood for humor. So he filed it away for a more opportune moment — like surgery. There he got the properly appreciative reaction, as lead trauma surgeon Dr. Joseph Giordano — a liberal Democrat — told him, “Today, Mr. President, we’re all Republicans.”

Bleeding to death with a bullet in his chest, and he’s doing shtick. That was so Dad. Anyone reading this who knew him will be nodding and thinking: He was embarrassed to be putting everyone out. The idea that schedules had been disrupted, people’s routines upended, that he had been an agent of chaos, would have filled him with dismay. He was the one meant to bring order to the world. He was supposed to be the lifesaver.

Between the moment he was shot and the time he left surgery, Dad lost roughly half his blood volume. That he survived is testament to the quick reactions of Jerry Parr and his Secret Service detail and the sterling care he received at George Washington University hospital. He was discharged after two weeks, and his recovery — a few complications notwithstanding — proceeded apace. A state-of-the-art home gym was installed in the White House living quarters. Before long, Dad was boasting that he’d added an inch of muscle to his chest.

In a town where everything is rendered into political advantage (or its opposite), Dad’s plucky response to near assassination earned him valuable capital during his first term. His cherished tax cuts were passed. However, they were scaled back when it became apparent that trickle-down economics was, indeed, “voodoo.” His approval rating in polls fell to 35% but then revived along with economic indicators. Before you knew it, another campaign season was coming round again.

We children might have found it strange that our father, whom we had witnessed scampering about the house in his Y-fronts, could have become president. But from the moment he entered politics back in the ’60s and people began speaking of him as presidential material, none of us doubted that he could win. We never had second thoughts about his ability to fill the chair. This made my telling him that I didn’t want him to run for re-election in 1984 distinctly uncomfortable. I said: “You’ve already been shot once. That’ll only give other idiots ideas — and there are plenty of them out there. I don’t want to see anything like that happen again. I know you’ve already made up your mind, but I have to tell you, I’d prefer you didn’t run.”

Every word I spoke was true. But I had other concerns as well, ones I couldn’t share.

Three years into his first term as president, I felt the first shivers of concern that something beyond mellowing was affecting my father. We’d always argued over this issue or that. He generally had the advantage of practiced talking points backed up by staff research, but I was an unabashed, occasionally effective advocate for my own positions. “He told me you make him feel stupid,” my mother once shared, to my alarm. I didn’t want my father to feel stupid. If he was going to shoulder massive responsibility, I wanted him to feel on top of his game. If he was going to fulfill his duties as president, he would have to be.

Watching his first debate with 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, I began to experience the nausea of a bad dream coming true. At 73, Ronald Reagan would be the oldest president ever re-elected. Some voters were imagining grandpa in charge of a bristling nuclear arsenal, and it was making them nervous. Worse, my father now seemed to be giving them reason for concern. My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses. He looked tired and bewildered.

In the debate’s aftermath, Dad knew he’d performed badly but convinced himself he’d been “overtrained.” There may have been some truth to that. My earlier worries, however, remained.

I flew out to Kansas City, Mo., for the second debate two weeks later. Should Dad fall, I felt I should be there to help catch him.

I needn’t have worried. Whatever had been bothering my father, he seemed to have vanquished it. Knowing he fed off the approval of crowds, his staff had arranged a brief appearance before an enthusiastic audience prior to the debate. That got him loosened up. With a sharp slap on the behind from his younger son, he entered the hall his usual confident self. The Mondale campaign effectively ended when Dad, responding to a question about his fitness for office, ad-libbed that he would not “exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Backstage afterward, I high-fived Dad and let out a loud whoop. He went on, of course, to one of the most dominant victories in presidential election history, with Mondale winning only one state — Minnesota, his home — out of 50.

I don’t want to give the impression that my father was mumbling incoherently during this or any period. But by the time he turned 76, he had survived a near-fatal shooting and surgery for colon cancer. As old men will, he’d learned to conserve his energy for crucial moments. The Iran-contra affair was a perfect example of the sort of mess Dad was ill-suited, at any age, to reckon with once it blew up in his face. Yet, little more than three months later, he would stand at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and challenge Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” It was a phrase that neither his chief of staff, Howard Baker, nor his deputy national-security adviser, Colin Powell, wanted him to employ. He showed better judgment in overruling them. Dad could clearly still get up for the big moments.

Before leaving office he’d endure one more trial that could not be edited from his script: his wife’s diagnosis of breast cancer and subsequent mastectomy. The reality of the situation caught up with him as he waited for her to return from surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Sitting by himself in a hospital room, he was no longer a world leader but a frightened and lonely man. His physician had asked a nurse, Paula Trivette, to check on him, and in her arms he broke down, sobbing uncontrollably. That he could do nothing to spare his Nancy from suffering was more than he could bear.

In July 1989, barely six months out of office, my father went out riding and was thrown by his horse. After refusing medical attention, he ultimately relented and was transported to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Surgeons opening his skull to relieve pressure on the brain emerged from the operating room with the news that they had detected probable signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Further tests conducted the following year confirmed those suspicions.

I’ve seen no evidence that my father (or anyone else) was aware of his medical condition while he was in office. Had the diagnosis been made in, say, 1987, would he have stepped down? I believe he would have. Today we are aware that the changes associated with Alzheimer’s can be in evidence years, even decades, before identifiable symptoms arise. The question, then, of whether my father suffered from the beginning stages of the disease while in office more or less answers itself.

Does this delegitimize his presidency? Only to the extent that President Kennedy’s Addison’s disease and Lincoln’s clinical depression undermine theirs. Better to judge our presidents by what they actually accomplish than what hidden factors may be weighing on them. We are entitled to approve or disapprove of my father’s conduct in office irrespective of his medical condition. That likely condition, though, serves as a reminder that when we elect presidents, we elect human beings with all their foibles and weaknesses. I find something courageous in my father’s dedicated pursuit — even in the face of his declining powers — of peaceful rapprochement with the Soviet Union, the world’s other nuclear superpower, throughout his second term. He never stopped wanting to save the world.

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